Now We Are Forty
Now We Are Forty: Conversations with Women
I am based in the French Department, in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, and my research focuses on the representation of women's lives in French culture (literature, self-writing, film, and other cultural documents) from around 1870 to the mid-twentieth century. In this respect, oral history is a sideline interest for me although it intersects with my wider research interests.
In June 2023 I published a new oral history of British women born in the 1970s with a focus on moving from youth to middle age. Between 2016-2018, I set out to track down and interview the girls who had been in my class at the comprehensive school we attended in the late 1980s to the early 1990s. The school is located in the distant suburbs of London, at the edge of the Home Counties.
Now We Are Forty opens with a brief reflection on my own life, and on those of my grandmothers, who raised children just after the Second World War, and my mother who had four children in the 1970s. What follows is a series of nine portraits of the various women I interviewed, who come from a range of social backgrounds and have gone on to have quite different lives. In these conversations, they reflected on their mothers’ experiences, their childhoods, our schooling, and adult life since leaving school. Common themes include motherhood, social class, careers and jobs, family, relationships, feminism, sex and sexuality, friendship, and how society has changed for women and girls in the years since we were born.
Now We Are Forty is a response to a similar book published by the journalist Mary Ingham a generation earlier. Now We Are Thirty (published by Methuen in 1981), a wonderfully evocative book, looked at the lives of a generation of grammar-school girls born in 1947-48, who came of age in the early ‘60s, and who turned thirty in 1977, the year after the girls in my class were born. Many of the women Mary Ingham interviewed were the same age as our mothers, drawn from the postwar ‘bulge’ generation of the 1940s-‘50s.
Read more about the project with this pre-publication version of a short piece about the book for the Oral History journal.
Purchase the book on Amazon.
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